Thursday, 8 May 2008
Just a quick note: the Full Federal Court judgment in IceTV is now up on AustLII. The case concerns the electronic program guide for television: Channel Nine sued a company which was providing the EPG for people wanting to make fully functional use of digital television recorders. Background on the case here.
At first instance, IceTV won – Bennett J found that there was no copyright infringement. It was a ruling that surprised a lot of people – so perhaps the fact that the appeal has been allowed – that IceTV has lost its case in the Full Federal Court – is less surprising. Although quite possibly pretty inconvenient for the makers of digital video recorders of the TiVo type.
In any event, more comments once I’ve digested what the judgment actually says!
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2 Responses to “IceTV judgment handed down”
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May 9th, 2008 at 1:43 am
The crux is this section:
111 The time and title information incorporated into the Weekly Schedules reflected a great deal of skill and labour on the part of Mr Healy and Ms Wieland. As we have explained, Ice, to the extent it reproduced time and title information from the Weekly Schedules, appropriated the skill and labour used by Nine to create the Weekly Schedules. Contrary to her Honour’s conclusion, the skill and labour in selecting and arranging programming should not be regarded as separate and discrete from the extremely modest skill and labour involved in setting down on paper the programs already selected and presenting them in the form of the Weekly Schedules. The skill and labour expended by Nine were part of a single process leading to the creation of the copyright work as the written record of Nine’s programming decisions and the associated program information.
I’m very uncomfortable with this argument. For example, you would own the copyrights on a list of student grades, since preparing those grades took “skill and labour… of a single process”. If the students took their returned and marked papers and collated the grades themselves they would infringe your copyright.
May 9th, 2008 at 3:48 pm
Hi Glen,
I’m not really sure either that that is the crux of the judgment, or that your hypothetical follows. I’m less concerned about the fact that the selection was recognised as part of the ‘originality’ of the compilation than how that was used in the infringement analysis (see my more detailed comments in next post).
As for the students collating grades – well, I don’t necessarily agree – the grade collation might well fit within the recognised exception to the kind of analysis in IceTV on the relevance of preparatory work – namely, that work not directed towards the construction of a copyright work might not count. When I grade papers, it is to assign results to individual papers – not to create the compilation of grades.